


Touch Your Lunch

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Drinking, F/F, Humor, Machines, Slapstick, Sushi, Tail Sex, Teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25856365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: She wants Ilya to lick or bite her the way she bites sushi. The diagonal line of Ilya’s tongue parallels the diagonals in her headpiece, and Kate wonders whether she should take a picture before the moment of tough cuteness goes away. (Definitely no.)
Relationships: Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin
Kudos: 9





	Touch Your Lunch

**Author's Note:**

> Set between Marauders (2019) no. 1 and Marauders no. 6.

“You may now touch your lunch.”

“What?” Kate is confused, then delighted. The voice from beyond the conveyor belt means the sushi automat has begun again. She remembers these sorts of semi-self-service restaurants from her time in Japan; she wasn’t expecting one here in this gleaming just-outside-Seattle mall. Sushimat is a retro-futuristic setup with booths and gadgets and visible gears and a tiny burbling fountain right in the midst of a food court. Not glamorous. But Pacific Northwest sushi-- mmm.

“May I touch your lunch?” Illyana asks, echoing—mockingly?—the robot voice. Kate and Ilya have come directly here from a mission on Bainbridge Island—a newly emerging mutant needed a rescue from their restrictive parents’ home—and now the new mutant’s off shopping for warm-weather, Krakow-appropriate clothing with Rahne and Amara. 

Illyana’s so hungry she doesn’t even want to change out of her armor—besides, sushi. They didn’t know it would be high-tech, rotating-menu, computers-keep-track self-serve.

“You may now touch your lunch,” the conveyor belt booms again, and the rotating trays of sushi, sashimi, pickles (so many pickles), rice and tempura begin again, like a mock-up of sidewalks from the 30th century, done at 1/10 scale, with brightly-hued food. As always, Illyana’s selections include uni, fragrant sea urchin that looks like a coarse, sandy pudding and smells like socks if you’re not a fan; Kate sometimes wonders what nostalgia for what Limbo snacks has caused Illyana to like it. Kate herself sticks to eel, tuna, yellowtail, whitefish sashimi and yes, a second cup of sake. She picked up a taste for it that in Japan.

Kate watches Illyana lick her lips. There’s something exciting about watching someone you love enjoy something that much, especially when she knows she’s being suggestive. She wants Ilya to lick or bite her the way she bites sushi. The diagonal line of Ilya’s tongue parallels the diagonals in her headpiece, and Kate wonders whether she should take a picture before the moment of tough cuteness goes away. (Definitely no.)

Kate’s a bit tired. No; she’s exhausted. The island mutant—named, ironically, Green—had a plant-growth thing going on, like Black Tom on a bad day, and Illyana had to cut through roots and branches and twenty-foot ferns and send a few stray animate redwoods to Limbo while Magma prevented the erupting roots from tearing the rest of the island apart. She can use her powers precisely now.

Meanwhile Kate and Rahne got the parents and the best friends at the sleepover and the mutant themselves to safety on a houseboat, which took almost twelve hours: calm, persistent argument with the parents—not argument, really, just outlasting and insisting that their kid came first—was the worst part, and that was Kate’s job. She’d been on both ends of that one often enough. Mutants whose powers are mostly for combat don’t realize how tiring negotiations can be. Especially when you don’t use mind control. Sometimes you want to stop negotiating and say "eat me."

Now Kate just wants to hold Illyana’s hand and drink sake and eat sushi and then go home, or at least back to the Marauder. 

That and learn how to tease. “You have no idea how to tease,” Illyana had said on the way over. “We’ll have to show you.” We meaning Ilya and Rachel Grey. “You never say things like ‘If you dare.’ Or ‘Eat me.’ Or ‘Is that so.’” Kate wants to learn to do more for her lovers. But she’s tired.

At least the island’s fine now. Green’s fine. Their friends are fine too. Green’s asked for a couple of days—after they all go shopping -- to consider whether to move to Krakoa. Kate bets they will.

Kate bets she herself won’t, or not any time soon. (She drains another cup of sake.) Until she can pass through the gates she’s going to be the best pirate she can be. Maybe afterwards too. And learn to tease. Eat me. Give me all your doubloons or else arrrrson. It’s an inside-outsider, screw-the-rules attitude she’s finally learning to adopt for herself, after years of admiring it in her first and most badass girlfriend, whose stray straight blond hairs keep almost touching her rice.

Her rice, and her chopsticks, and the conveyor belts. And the little wheels underneath the lowest one, the one with the ginger, wasabi, and salted soybeans. “Ilya!” Kate says, and moves to brush strands of Illyana’s hair away before they get caught and dragged. 

Then Kate realizes she didn’t have to do that. The locks of hair move away by themselves as Illyana snaps her fingers softly, moving her right hand away from her face, while she keeps eating her sushi with her left hand, never touching her lunch. Kate loves watching Ilya eat: because she loves watching Ilya take care of herself, because she loves watching Ilya do almost anything, because she loves watching Ilya. (Kate drains one more cup of sake, in tribute to Illyana’s bands.)

But there’s something extra about this particular installment of “Kate loves watching Ilya eat,” something Kate takes a while to put her finger on, and then when she does, her hand almost dematerializes. The way Ilya shifts one hand in one direction and the other in another, plus the chopsticks, plus the way the pauldrons on her armor (she never changed out of that armor: she’s hungry!) balance themselves when she moves, plus the conveyor belts, plus the neat cushioned swivel chairs in which Kate and Ilya sit…. it’s like Illyana has multiple arms and fingers and robo-mechanisms and hands at her service. Like she’s got six or eight arms to serve her at once.

As she once did. It doesn’t come up much now, but back when Kate was living in space, Illyana dated Spiral. It’s hard for Kate to imagine, except when it’s easy. It must have been fun in particular ways that no partner with only two arms and two hands could match.

Kate shrugs off her red pirate coat and takes another sip of her fragrant sake. (How many mutants did she save this week? She’s earned it.) Spiral on one of her good days (there were good days and bad days), with Illyana on their porch upstate, Spiral holding Illyana’s strong bare shoulders in Spiral’s upper arms and rubbing Illyana’s back with her middle arms while Illyana’s tail scratched Spiral’s lower back and Spiral let her lower hands and arms wander Illyana’s thighs… Spiral lying back and letting Illyana move ahead, slowly, on top of her, taking down Illyana’s leather shorts—or her denim shorts; they lived on a farm—to press, still slowly, with her palm against Illyana’s mound…. Spiral and Illyana rolling off the couch by accident and Spiral turning it into a kind of erotic gymnastics performance, righting the couple with one pair of hands while remaining in an embrace with another… 

Could Kate use her own powers to do that? Would Illyana want to have even more fun—discreetly, sweetly, but right now—than she got from her uni, her pickled plums, her eel? Kate reaches out from her own stool to her girlfriend’s stool and places her hand on Illyana’s thigh. Other diners are elsewhere in the restaurant, watching conveyor belts, hoping their sushi comes next, but there are screens and baffles and angles. Maybe if Kate uses powers… she reaches out farther and phases, so that Illyana gets that pleasant tickling feeling that comes from touching while mostly phased. Kate looks up to see the broad smile on Ilya’s face, the raised eyebrow, the sneaky start of a tail—

\--and Kate falls backward off her stool, phasing her whole body so as not to crash to the floor and get hurt. Illyana goes from amused to turned on to snickering to uh-oh within a few seconds, and then back to amused: Kate’s red pirate coat is aflutter but she looks safe. She’s blushing, almost the color of those pickled plums—Illyana, on that stool now high above Kate, drops another pickled plum into her mouth—

\--and Kate finishes falling, all the way through the conveyor belts and then through the control module at their center. Flat on her back in the center of the automated sushi restaurant, Kate figures out right away that she’s saved her butt (literally; she almost landed on her butt) but disrupted all the restaurant’s electronics. The little city of sushi stops cold with a jerk. Dozens of pieces of tuna and salmon and rice cakes and dumplings, stopped short, fly off their trays—

\--there’s Lockheed; where has Lockheed been all this time? the little purple dragon catches and swallows bits of sushi in midair—

\--and there are the patrons, standing up from their partitioned booths and paired-off, screened-off stools to look around and glower at the only visibly odd figures there: the young woman in a red and white pirate outfit who has apparently merged with the restaurant, and the tall badass leather-clad blond who seems uncommonly alert to danger, ready to protect anyone who needs protection, scary if you’re not used to it.

A bearded man stands up and says “I want my tempura!”

A big person in a gold frock with an asymmetrical haircut and hoop earrings says “I think we’re safe now.”

A kid who’s been hiding under a stool pops up and says “That was fun but I got wasabi all over my hair.” The kid is correct. The kid’s hair shows flecks of green. Another kid—a sibling?—pipes up “I want my lunch!”

The stopped conveyor belt at the center of all the other conveyor belts has disgorged about twenty whole raw fish, along with a tub of scallops and another tub of pickled plums, all over the tables and stools. The diners do not look happy. Several look wet.

Kate realizes that she’s drunk ,and that she might take a while to climb out of all the conveyor belts and gears and refrigerator chutes in the middle of the restaurant (the ones that connect the customer area to the sushi chef downstairs). She’s lucky she didn’t fall all the way to the basement. 

Illyana realizes that several dozen civilians are staring at her: she doesn’t care, but Kate might, and if Green comes back that’s definitely an emotional problem for Green. And a practical one, if there are trees in the mall for Green to animate when she's stressed out and anxious.

And then Rahne and Amara show up, with Green in tow—Green’s bought, for some reason, a parachute-fabric jacket and a pair of shades like Jubilee’s. 80s nostalgia has no limits, apparently. 

Nor does Amara’s resourcefulness. “Humans and mutants of the Evergeen State,” she announces theatrically. “Welcome to the first annual Greater Seattle Indoor Nova Roma-Style Seafood Barbecue.” And thin streams of lava underneath all the food that would otherwise spoil make it into broiled fish, and roasted plums, and sautéed scallops. Who knew—Kate thinks sleepily—that Amara had it in her?

When the giant whole fish are all broiled, Ilya starts cutting slices, bite-sized and meal-sized out of then with her sword.

Rahne smiles broadly and takes Green’s hand, and both of them join the baseline humans and dig in. (Kate passes out.)

Hours later, before dawn, Kate awakens beside Illyana in a motel’s king-sized bed. She’s now in her soft blue-and-white cotton floral sleep shirt, not her costume. Illyana must have decided to spend an extra night around here, rather than taking Kate back to the boat. And taken Kate here and helped her change out of her street clothes and tucked her in. Kate feels sweet inside, and seen, and cared for.

Moonlight frames Illyana's attentive face, her neck, her lips. Illyana’s up reading one of those books whose characters aren’t in any human language. When she closes it, fumes fly up. Her tail flaps a bit. She smiles.

“I’m not hung over,” Kate tells Illyana, surprised.

“New spell,” Illyana says. “Needs lots of cumin. If you smell curry that’s why.”

“I’m hungry,” Kate says. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“Shouldn’t have had so much sake, or shouldn’t have fallen through the automat? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about….” Kate blushes. “All the conveyor belts and robot arms and all the things you could do with Spiral that you could never do with me.”

“That remains to be seen,” says Illyana, tickling Kate with that tail as she settles on the edge of Kate’s bed. “Hungry for real? Or are you just making fun of my appetite?”

“Eat me,” Kate says.

Illyana raises an eyebrow again. “Is that teasing?”

Kate leans forward and places Illyana’s hand on her collarbone, just above her small breasts. “You may now touch your lunch.”

**Author's Note:**

> For Illyana's time with Spiral, see any of several fics by the wonderful Magik3, but especially https://archiveofourown.org/works/13584345/chapters/31180635


End file.
